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THERE IS ONE office al AmigaWnr d with a door that locks. It's kind of cavelike, with poor ventilation and a floor that shudders. But it’s quiet and secure, and that's where we put Senior Editor of Technology Lou Wallace his computers are worth more than the rest of ours combined, and they make a lot more noise. Usually, not many people go into Lou’s cave, but over the past several weeks the cave has been the place to be for the Amiga World staff. You see, we’ve been kind of like the jury in a big mobster trial. But instead of being sequestered, we've been under non-disclosure. (1 guess it’s sort of the same thing, really.) The reason is that the cave has been home to a 25Mhz Amiga 3000 the machine that answers the critics and sets the stage for a whole new family of Amigas and now the word is out. We’ve also been playing with Amiga- Vision, Commodore’s new multimedia authoring system, doing silly things like building interactive movies. You can read more about this puppy later in the issue. But first, let’s back up a few years, say to 1985, when the Amiga was launched. At that time, it was clearly superior in capability and pure price performance. Since then, however, Commodore has taken it on the chin for failing either to improve Amiga technology quickly enough or to promote the advances it did make effectively enough especially given the fierce competition from IBM and Apple on both fronts. That was then. The Amiga 3000 is now! It’s fast, professional-looking, and has a 32-bit bus that cries out to the Amiga-loving universe. Expand me! Plus, there is an awful lot else going on with the A3000 announcement besides just a new machine. (See “Welcome To A New Generation!” on p. 18 for full details of the Commodore announcement.) With the Amiga 3000, the new 2.0 operating system, Amiga Vision, s pi fly new monitors and speakers, and a host of related networking products, Commodore is on the verge of gaining a whole new image. Forget game company. Forget has-been. Try leader in personal-com- puter technology. Some may call it overdue. I simply call it a welcome sight. In this one set of announcements, Commodore has defined a good deal of the Amiga’s future, and has made enormous strides towards bringing it into the mainstream. And the price of the Amiga 3000 (under S4000) is competitive, to say the very least. The A3000’s 32-bit architecture puts it squarely in workstation and high-end (read expensive) PC and Macintosh territory. With its flexible 32-bit bus, it is a machine that can take whatever cards vou throw at it. At the same time, the Amiga in all models and configurations maintains its clear advantages in multitasking and in the large array of low-cost, sophisticated graphics, video, and animation applications available. The networking breaks down any harriers to entering lucrative corporate and government markets. Lor Amiga users, it means we can tie into major networks and share information with people we want to share information with. The Amiga 3000’s Enhanced Chip Set (ECS) and V2.0 of the operating system provide a radical new base from which to generate all kinds of future technological advances. This is clearly only the beginning. Engineering is at a fever pitch. Look for the pipeline to fill up with a host of even more excit ing new products in the coming months and years. Commodore is even getting aggressive on more than technology; its marketing is getting downright wild, f expect the company to start naming names, calling Apple's and IBM’s multimedia hype into serious question. Instead of ignoring the empty promises of these so-called market leaders, Commodore ought to be calling them out into the street to figlu a multimedia battle that would make Lee Marvin proud. AmigaVision, which makes Apple’s HyperCard look thoroughly wimpy, is a big part of the Commodore arsenal.